Coffee has been shown to have numerous health benefits and researchers in Toronto may have found two more. They say that drinking coffee may protect you against both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. And they’re not just talking about the full-strength caffeinated variety.

“Coffee consumption does seem to have some correlation to a decreased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease,” says Dr. Donald Weaver, co-director of the Krembil Brain Institute at Toronto Western Hospital. “But we wanted to investigate why that is — which compounds are involved and how they may impact age-related cognitive decline.”

Dr. Weaver enlisted Dr. Ross Mancini, a research fellow in medicinal chemistry and Yanfei Wang, a biologist, to help. The team chose to investigate three different types of coffee — light roast, dark roast, and decaffeinated dark roast.

“The caffeinated and de-caffeinated dark roast both had identical potencies in our initial experimental tests,” said Dr. Mancini in a news release. “So we observed early on that its protective effect could not be due to caffeine.”

Mancini says this is due to a group of compounds known as phenylindanes, which are created as a result of the roasting process for coffee beans. Phenylindanes are the only compound investigated in the study that inhibit both beta amyloid and tau, two protein fragments common in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, from clumping.

“So phenylindanes are a dual-inhibitor. Very interesting, we were not expecting that.” said Dr. Weaver.

Dark roast is best

As roasting leads to higher quantities of phenylindanes, dark roasted coffee appears to be more protective than light roasted coffee.

“It’s the first time anybody’s investigated how phenylindanes interact with the proteins that are responsible for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s,” said Dr. Mancini. “The next step would be to investigate how beneficial these compounds are, and whether they have the ability to enter the bloodstream, or cross the blood-brain barrier.”

The fact that it’s a natural compound vs. synthetic is also a major advantage, says Dr. Weaver. Last year, a study found that Italian-style coffee can lower the risk of prostate cancer.

“Mother Nature is a much better chemist than we are and Mother Nature is able to make these compounds. If you have a complicated compound, it’s nicer to grow it in a crop, harvest the crop, grind the crop out and extract it than try to make it.”

But, he admits, there is much more research needed before it can translate into potential therapeutic options.

“What this study does is take the epidemiological evidence and try to refine it and to demonstrate that there are indeed components within coffee that are beneficial to warding off cognitive decline. It’s interesting but are we suggesting that coffee is a cure? Absolutely not.”

About the Author

Truman has been a bureau chief and correspondent in D.C., Los Angeles, Phoenix and elsewhere, reporting for radio, television, print and news services, for more than 30 years. Most recently, he has reported extensively on health and consumer issues for ConsumerAffairs.com and FairfaxNews.com.